Portions of a network environment (e.g., hardware, software, and networking components) may be replicated in order to validate runtime aspects of the design and/or resources of the network. This replicated environment is referred to as a network testbed, and performance characteristics of the network are identified by testing the network elements and interfaces instantiated in the testbed.
Prior art network testbeds consist of physical network devices, such as switches, routers, network interface cards (NICs), and access points. It is often necessary to replicate the topology of the network to understand the operational demands on the resources in the network. For extremely large networks, replicating the corresponding environment to full scale—including a large quantity of physical devices, interfaces, and communication links, is impractical. Thus, prior art network testing solutions do not fully replicate a large and/or complex network environment, but instead create a smaller testing environment that is limited by expense (i.e., how many physical network devices are available) and by manual configuration (i.e., manually configuring and interconnecting network devices). Thus, prior art network testbeds fail to fully validate and verify large scale and/or complex network environments.